Talk:One user's view about the Historical Jesus/@comment-3338975-20130105204204
In explanation of just how ''Jesus was able to avoid being manuveured into an arranged marriage until the time of his ministry ("the hidden years" the apocryphal writings of later centuries were so interested in, and which they portrayed so fantastically as to create grave doubt as to whether they had ''really ''retrieved historical information unknown about Jesus in the first century), the following points may suffice to explain it in a (relatively) mundane fashion. Up until Yeshua reached the "age of reason" (twelve/thirteen - basically, when he hit puberty), it would be unlikely in his social setting that he'd be married off yet (though parents obviously may ''plan for it beforehand, all things depending). After that point, most Jewish males would be married off rather quickly (as they were generally not considered truly men until they had consummated their marriage in the Jewish religious outlook of the time), but in Yeshua's case he seems to have shown a special aptitude in intuitively grasping the Hebrew Scriptures (as the story of his staying behind in the Temple to listen to and ask questions of the teachers there seems to indicate, even when stripped of its more anachronistic elements). For this reason, he most likely was then sent off to a proto-rabbinnical school to advance in his basic literacy concerning the Jewish religious-historical classic at the hands of a scribe or scribes until he reached an age approaching closer to (what we would now consider) adulthood, perhaps the only socially acceptable avenue for not ''getting married at a young age at the time (accepted, because of the nobility the training was seen as conveying to young Jewish boys). This then begs the question, why was he never formally inducted into the mainstream schools of the Pharisees or the Sadducees, as can be seen in the fact that his ministry expresses views both add odds and in agreement with each school at different points (as well as holding some view held by neither)? The answer, interestingly enough, may lie with the fact that Jesus was always called the son of Miriam/Mary within the Gospels, and ''never the son of Yoesph/Joesph (though he was at least the legal ''son of Joesph ''even on their non-biological terms); if this sounds odd, the reason it might hold the key is because the total lack of mention of Yoesph after Yeshua hits puberty associated with it, which indicates that Yeshua was spoken of in terms of his mother rather than his father because she was the parent who was still around - meaning, Yoesph passed away close to the end of Yeshua's period of Scriptural training. This, then, would require Yeshua as Miriam's eldest son to take upon himself the responsibility to provide for her and the rest of her and Yoesph's children economically through his own handiwork as an artisan after the mold of his legal father, a duty which at his now-greater age could potentially supersede the social expectation that he start a family of his own (though it'd most likely be seen as super-erogatory on his part to treat the former as precluding the latter by society). It seems that his family managed to attain a decent amount of economic security, considering their position as lower middle-class peasants, by the time he reached his thirties, as economic problems are never discussed amongst the reasons he and his family had a falling out once he began his wandering ministry. It would seem to be that around this time Jesus became aware of John the Plunger's preaching of the coming Kingdom of God, only for this to cause something to click inside of him which made him decide to make himself a disciple of the preacher by the Jordan and to be baptized accordingly (at which point, responsibility for the family of Mary seems to have devolved upon Jesus' half-brother James, given his later prominence in their family affairs). Yeshua seems to have soon questioned the imperious-transformation-of-the-political-realm-by-the-Anointed-through-miracles-of-judgement aspect of his master's original teaching, however, as seems to be indicated by the "three temptations of Jesus" in the desert (where the Bapist held his asectic ministry, mind you) and the verses Yeshua was said to have quoted in response to them (when taken in the context of the verses surrounding them in the Old Testament). Because of this, he seems to have eventually distanced himself from his former teacher, and begun teaching the altered form of John's message with himself understood as the locus of the eschatological transformation through propechy by politically-uncoerced acceptance - John having explicitly not regarded himself as such a locus because of his inability to work the miracles of "the stronger one" needed to coerce society in his view, no longer a problem in Yeshua's view because the "stronger one" would transform society because of the existence of his greater sense of justice alongside a greater sense of duty to identify with the people (united through his personal charisma). And at this point, the ministry of Yeshua began to unfold in the manner discussed above.